In an unusual show of candor, a high-level UN official admitted today that the they were wholly unprepared to run a program of the size and scope of the Iraqi Oil For Food Program.
Here are excerpts from the Associated Press article:
U.N. Deputy Secretary-General Louise Frechette said the United Nations was unprepared for the mammoth task of providing humanitarian relief for 24 million Iraqis and hoped it would never be given a job like the oil-for-food program again.
"We certainly have taken pride in the fact that the program has served to feed and provide basic necessities to people and that their own personal faith improved over the life of the program," Frechette said on Tuesday. "But we have also seen that the program has revealed some basic weaknesses in our own internal systems."
She was speaking at a press conference to respond to an interim report by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker of his investigation of corruption in the oil-for-food program. The report criticized the U.N.'s system of awarding contracts, its failure to follow-up some recommendations from auditors, and its policy of keeping documents from scrutiny by the 191 U.N. member states.
Frechette said some of the weaknesses, especially dealing with contracts, had been addressed before Volcker issued the report on Feb. 3, "but clearly, there were other weaknesses in that system, from which we are learning."
"Personally, I hope to God we never get another oil-for-food program or anything approaching that kind of responsibility, which was tantamount to trying to oversee the entire import-export regime of a country of 24 million people, which was a tall order," she said.
"If ever, God forbid, we were to be given that kind of responsibility in the future, we certainly would go about it differently and we certainly would apply the lessons that we are learning from the exhaustive investigations that are going on at the moment," Frechette said.
Perhaps the transparency of functions and operations that has eluded this institution for decades is finally being instituted. Perhaps.
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